Successful marketing of any type involves a combination of many different variables. Perhaps the two single-most important elements of good marketing are:

1. Getting the Right Message to the Right Audience at the Right Time

2. Optimizing Future Marketing Efforts with Effective Result Analysis

The two final webinars during week 3 of Facebook Marketing Bootcamp emphasize how social media marketing is no different – particularly in these two ways – from the standard marketing formats that have been used for decades. Experts from the Facebook marketing team explain the benefits of using the platform’s different technology options for better targeting and reach with segmentation and social plugins and better optimization using Page Insights:

Maximizing Efforts with Insights & Optimization:

As marketers, we know that creating a campaign is both an art and a science. The art aspect involves finding the right image combined with title and copy optimization where the science lies in proper targeting, employing the right call to action and performance analysis.

Bootcamp provides specific tips on how to achieve this blend of art and science with three steps suggested for optimizing your Facebook campaigns:

1. Craft Your Ad Creative:

Body Copy:

Questions drive engagement in title or body
Keep the body copy short and clear
Encourage users to act immediately
Give clear calls to action using high-impact verbs to drive urgency

Use an image that speaks to the audience demographic
Avoid the use of logos unless your logo is well recognized
Make the most of the full space available
Simple, uncluttered images work best

2. Segment & Structure Your Campaigns Clearly

Create multiple ads by using different creative within the same campaign in order to identify which creative elements you should use (Bootcamp recommends a maximum of 3 to 4 ads per campaign).

Use a unique URL for each campaign in order to measure which demographic delivers the best performance.

Identify which creative elements are the most successful with each audience and pause the ads with the lowest performance. This ensures that your most effective ads are getting the most views.

Analyze your reporting and reallocate your daily budgets according to your best performing audiences and ads.

Monitor successful ads based on your key metrics; for example, cost-per-click, click-through-rate, cost-per-acquisition, social reach (Facebook defines “social reach” as the number of people who have seen your ad associated with their friends’ name).

3. Evaluate Your Campaign Performance with Reports & Page Insights

Insights is Facebook’s reporting and analysis tool, used by businesses and developers to evaluate their success with the Facebook platform. Facebook has the following to say about their Insights tool: “By understanding and analyzing trends within user growth and demographics, consumption of content and creation of content, Page owners and Platform developers are better equipped to improve their business with Facebook” (Insights).

Insights will help you understand the performance of your Page, including a new public number for “People talking about this;” learn which content resonates with your audience; and optimize how you publish to your audience.

For example, when looking at the Responder Demographics Report, you may see one particular audience segment that responded at a higher rate than any other segment. You can use this information to further target that audience and better understand the market that is most responsive to your campaigns.

Make Your Technology Social:

Marketing is about pushing information out to your target audience and social media platforms have an unprecedented ability to reach deeper and further into your desired market. Facebook has built several tools that can help businesses make their technology “social,” and these are broken into two categories:

Social Plugins allow users to share their favorite products and content with their friends directly from your website. Using Plugins (e.g. Like Buttons, Comments, Like Box) helps you expand your social reach beyond your Facebook Page.

Each of these tools can help you spread word about your business through many different distribution channels and engagement platforms, but they won’t necessarily be right for every business. Before launching projects with either tool, determine whether the platform would be right for your business.